VALUES AND VALUING OF INDIVIDUAL LIFE IN JOURNALISTIC DISCOURSE PERTAINING TO THE EUROPEAN UNION (ON THE BASIS OF SELECTED ARTICLES FROM THE BRITISH PRESS 2007–2008)

The focus of this paper will concentrate on the discursive construction of personal identities through the participation of communicating individuals in interpersonal communication. Journalistic discourse, defined in terms of types of texts and text-processing activities embedded into social roles of communication participants and their culture, has been taken as the domain of research. Investigative perspective, namely, axiology, will be presented as a discipline being involved in searching for the essence of values.

Having appealed to the value-related concepts of sign and meaning in general, the axiosemiotic approach will be applied to the objects belonging to the domain of journalistic study. With the focus on the values of individuals and individual valuing processes, individual construction of meaning will be shown as one of the governing factors in the construction of one’s individuality, and therefore, identity. The paper will attempt at revealing what is hidden behind the aspects of individuality with regards to human identity.

Based on the material source from The Spectator, the study will be presented as carried out within a framework of an adopted classificatory model of values. All articles from The Spectator, from the selected 2-year time-span, were carefully examined and those that deal with EU issues were chosen for the research. Thus, the corpus consisting of about 27,150 thousands of words has been gathered. Having detected the textual exponents of values, some of the attempts at distinguishing and naming the specific types of individual values to which the press news appeals will be presented.